Zombie Theory: A Reader

499 Pages·2017·8.7 MB·English

by  Sarah Juliet Lauro (ed.)

ZOMBIE THEORY
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Z
OMBIE

THEORY
A Reader
SARAH JULIET LAURO Editor
University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Detail illustrations from George Pfau’s Zombieindex.net (2013) are reproduced on the part pages of
this volume, selected and reprinted with the permission of the artist.
Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lauro, Sarah Juliet, editor.
Title: Zombie theory : a reader / Sarah Juliet Lauro, editor.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and
index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017001738 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0090-8 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0091-5 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Zombies. | Zombies—Social aspects. | Zombies in popular culture. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video /
General.
Classification: LCC GR581 .Z64 2017 (print) | DDC 398.21—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001738
Contents
Introduction: Wander and Wonder in Zombieland vii
SARAH JULIET LAURO
Part I. Old Schools: Classic Zombies 1
1. Contagious Allegories: George Romero 7
STEVEN SHAVIRO
2. Zombie TV: Late- Night B Movie Horror Fest 20
JEFFREY ANDREW WEINSTOCK
3. Viral Cultures: Microbes and Politics in the Cold War 33
PRISCILLA WALD
4. Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper- Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies 63
ELIZABETH McALISTER
5. Slavoj Žižek, the Death Drive, and Zombies: A Theological Account 85
OLA SIGURDSON
Part II. Capitalist Monsters 103
6. Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope 111
JEN WEBB and SAMUEL BYRNAND
7. Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia 124
DAVID McNALLY
8. Alien- Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism 137
JEAN COMAROFF and JOHN COMAROFF
9. Zombies of Immaterial Labor: The Modern Monster and the Consumption of the Self 157
LARS BANG LARSEN

10. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and Zombies 171
SHERRYL VINT
Part III. Zombies and Other(ed) People 183
11. Zombie Race 189
EDWARD P. COMENTALE
12. Taking Back the Night of the Living Dead: George Romero, Feminism, and the Horror Film 212
BARRY KEITH GRANT
13. Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Sociality 223
SHAKA McGLOTTEN
14. Dead and Disabled: The Crawling Monsters of The Walking Dead 237
ANNA MAE DUANE
15. Trouble with Zombies: Muselmänner, Bare Life, and Displaced People 246
JON STRATTON
Part IV. Zombies in the Street 271
16. Zombie London: Unexceptionalities of the New World Order 277
FRED BOTTING
17. Spooks of Biopower: The Uncanny Carnivalesque of Zombie Walks 294
SIMON ORPANA
18. The Scene of Occupation 316
TAVIA NYONG’O
19. The Walking Dead and Killing State: Zombification and the Normalization of Police Violence 332
TRAVIS LINNEMANN, TYLER WALL, and EDWARD GREEN
Part V. New Life for the Undead 353
20. Nekros: or, The Poetics of Biopolitics 361
EUGENE THACKER
21. Grey: A Zombie Ecology 381
JEFFREY JEROME COHEN
22. A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism 395
SARAH JULIET LAURO and KAREN EMBRY
23. “We Are the Walking Dead”: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative 413
GERRY CANAVAN
Acknowledgments 433
Further Reading 435
Previous Publications 453

Contributors 457
Index 461
Introduction
Wander and Wonder in Zombieland
SARAH JULIET LAURO
For a long time, I’ve felt as if I were being chased by a horde of zombies— the kind that
spring up out of the ground like itinerant mushrooms and swell to insurmountable
numbers at your heels. These aren’t real zombies, of course, but articles, essays, chapters,
short stories, comics, and books about zombies, the catalog of which has seemed to grow
exponentially over the past decade. Once I felt, working on a dissertation, and then a
book, on the figure of the living dead, that I had to read them all. I didn’t, I couldn’t, I
haven’t, and I won’t. For I soon found that by the time one compiles a reading list and
works one’s way, methodically, through it, a whole new crop have sprouted that need to
have their heads kicked off. It’s rather like the way they are never not painting the Golden
Gate Bridge, or so my grandmother tells me, for as soon as they finish at one end, they
have to begin again at the other.
Today, one can find the image of the zombie emblazoned on a wide variety of items,
including, but not limited to, lunch boxes, backpacks, pencil cases, wristwatches, iPhone
cases, guitar picks and guitar straps, bottles of hand sanitizer, gel pens, key chains,
keys and key toppers (Zombikeys), temporary tattoos, lapel pins, and dozens of zombie-
themed T- shirts, socks, and even baby onesies. There are novelty items, like a pencil
holder in which the writing implement impales a zombie statuette, various zombie
pacifiers that give one’s infant a grisly gob, zombie garden gnomes, the now infamous
Zombie of MontClaire Moors lawn sculpture as seen in the in- flight catalog on various
airlines, a zombie front yard flamingo by Forum Novelties Inc., and multiple styles of tin
yard signs warning of zombies à la “beware of the dog.” There are also zombie items for
Fido: a bandana reading “K- 9 division zombie hunter,” dog tags, and a zombie’s severed
foot that serves as a chew toy. And, for the kitchen, Undead Fred zombie cookie cutters,
a Zombie Brain Jell- O mold, assorted coffee mugs, an Elixir of the Dead wine bottle
holder and many zombie- themed wines and craft beers, a cookie jar made out of a zom-
bie’s head, Zombie Jerky and Zombie Blood edible snacks, a Zombie Survival energy
drink, and Zombie Cajun hot sauce. For the lady in your life, you might buy a zombie
cameo necklace by Mobtown Chicago or Zombie for Her spray cologne by Demeter.
There are too many games (including bowling pins), toys (including rubber duckies),
vii
viii SARAH JULIET LAURO
and other zombie paraphernalia (plush slippers) to mention here. And there are also
real weapons and survival kits marketed to the zombie enthusiast, such as the Zombie
Apocalypse Survival Kit by Gerber (not the baby food) that includes three knives, two
machetes, and an ax in a handy carrying case as well as various other items purportedly
for zombie hunting; ammo kits and tin survival kits; zombie target practice sheets; and
three- dimensional zombie target dummies that “bleed” when you shoot them. All of
this leaves out a myriad of paperbacks, DVDs, video games, comic books, and posters as
well as commodities marketed explicitly for Halloween, such as masks, various zombie
costumes— including my favorite, Zombie Marie Antoinette— and candy bowls for the
porch, seasonal decorations, and zombie makeup kits. Listing all of these items here
displays our culture’s obsession with zombies and makes visible one of the zombie’s
most historically legible shibboleths: its gross materialism that is a reflection of our
gross materialism.1 Today, there are many keys in which the zombie narrative plays:
there are even appearances of zombies in television commercials advertising cell phones
for Sprint, Starburst candy, and Audi cars. Some of these uses of the zombie make for
irritating ditties, signifying little and representing a much stripped- down version of the
zombie’s true complexity, but others transmute our most pressing concerns into haunt-
ing and beautiful music.
Though the old adage has it that one ought not judge a book by its cover, one has
merely to look at the width of Peter Dendle’s two volumes of his Zombie Movie Encyclopedia,
one devoted to the years 1932– 2000 and the second covering only 2000– 2010, to see
that zombie cinema has lately undergone what Kyle Bishop calls a “renaissance.”2 For
Dendle’s second volume, spanning only the first decade of the twenty- first century, is
longer than the first, which covers the entire history of zombies on film in the twen-
tieth century, by some thirty pages. Fictions produced on the topic in media besides
film, such as literature and video games, have kept pace with the number of zombie
movies produced. But, as the wide array of zombie commodities— from the bizarre
to the banal— indicates, it is also true that the first decades of the twenty- first century
witnessed a diversification of zombie demography.
The zombie is not just more present than ever before; it is also more various, and
creatures called “zombies” have evolved from their frightening forebears to include
comical, romantic, musical, and otherwise anodyne undead. For example, although
one expects to find a hefty selection of zombie literature housed in the fantasy or young
adult section of the bookstore, and among the graphic novels and comic books, one
now finds an increasing diversity of zombies lurking even in the humor section (as mock
self- help books or revisions of literary classics “now with violent zombie mayhem”) and
in the children’s section (see, for example, Zombie in Love or, a parody of that famously
famished caterpillar, The Very Hungry Zombie), and they are featured in highly lauded
works of contemporary fiction (most notably Colson Whitehead’s Zone One).3 Similarly,
zombies’ digital presence has outgrown the violent first- person shoot- ’em- ups and video
games that are often credited with the living dead’s cultural revitalization and can be
found in child- friendly, low- action games like Plants vs. Zombies, in educational games

like Math vs. Zombies (aimed at the K– 5 crowd), or in apps to encourage joggers to keep
up the pace: Zombies, Run!4
Introduction ix
Because of the zombie’s mutability, “What the Zombie Apocalypse Means”— which
is incidentally the subtitle of a collection called Thinking Dead edited by Murali Balaji—
is as roundly metaphysical and complicated a question as the smoking caterpillar’s query
to Alice: “Who are you?” Alice can’t answer the question because, having changed sizes,
she is no longer sure of herself: “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I
think I must have been changed several times since then.” Similarly, no one can seem to
agree on what the zombie means because, in part, the zombie keeps changing.
Perhaps it remains so captivating to audiences and critics alike because of its fungi-
bility: in one film, its cultural capital is spent representing serious threats like the AIDS
panic, fears of racial contamination, and concerns about corruption amid third world
development projects, but then one changes the channel and finds zombies on the ani-
mated show SpongeBob SquarePants, mocking the poor work ethic of a slacker employee
in a fast- food joint.
The semiotic “prolixity” of the zombie genre, as Jonathan Eburne writes in The Year’s
Work at the Zombie Research Center,5 may seem to some the result of the commercial
appropriation of the figure (not unlike the way one finds kale in everything these days),
but the zombie was never just one thing. Inherently dual— both living and dead— the
zombie dwells in contradiction even more than most monsters, which are, as Jeffrey
Cohen writes, border crashers by nature, hybrids that “seldom can be contained in a
simple, binary dialectic.”6
As Karen Embry and I first articulated in our article “A Zombie Manifesto: The
Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” the zombie’s paradoxical-
ity (as living/dead, for example) is the source of its symbolic potential— and for us, this
meant specifically its usefulness as a figure that grapples with the fundamental irrecon-
cilability of capitalism and humanism. I now wonder if the zombie’s refusal to be just
one thing may have translated into its protean nature: that because it operates not on
the model of the either/or (and neither appropriately both/and) but on something closer
to the fundamentally pessimistic neither/nor, it was thought that it might be made to
signify anything.
Like poor Alice, then, we have multiple questions at hand. One is, how did we get
here? Whence does our cultural fascination with zombies come? Another is, why are
we seemingly so surrounded by zombies these days? And, perhaps most central to this
volume’s purpose, what makes the zombie itself and the zombie’s popularity worthy of
serious study?
Some may think of this monster as American, but it is deeply global. While I trace
the zombie’s history in detail in my book The Transatlantic Zombie, I’ll keep to a thumb-
nail sketch here, one that is specific to my own assessment of the myth’s transmission.
I argue in my book that the zombie is an “American” monster only in the sense that it
comes directly out of a history of colonialism, enslavement, exploitation, and appropria-
tion. The zombie’s lineage can be traced to African soul capture myths that were carried
to the New World aboard slave ships bound for the colonial Caribbean. The zombie as
we know it today comes from the Haitian zombi, a product of sorcery in which a witch

doctor enslaves a victim whom he has raised from the dead to do his bidding or work
for him for free. Keeping the zombie perpetually in a semiconscious state in between